


The Adventure of the Sea-Soaked Scarves

by birdthatlookslikeastick



Category: Forever (TV), Sherlock (TV), Tunalock - Fandom
Genre: Angst, John i made you tea, Moral Lessons, Other, Public Nudity, True Love, Tuna - Freeform, albacore tuna, atlantic bluefin tuna, casefic, glub glub, human-tuna romantic love, interspecies angst, intra-genus tuna disguise, majestic flopping, mutual respect, tuna rides, tunalock, yellowfin tuna
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-22
Updated: 2015-11-22
Packaged: 2018-05-02 18:22:52
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,507
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5258924
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/birdthatlookslikeastick/pseuds/birdthatlookslikeastick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After a mysterious murder in the New York Aquarium, Henry Morgan joins investigative forces with the world’s only consulting tuna.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Adventure of the Sea-Soaked Scarves

Henry Morgan, Assistant Chief Medical Examiner, was thoroughly bored.

He had been called to a crime scene at the New York aquarium, as there was a corpse floating face down in the squid tank. It was abundantly clear what had happened: the man had been knocked out, fallen in, and drowned. However, Henry—despite being a rather exceptionally competent ME—couldn't say anything more precise because he was stuck in the public access area of the aquarium, and could only view the corpse through the thick acrylic aquarium windows. Detective Jo Martinez was stuck in traffic, and without her and her detective credentials, nobody would even let him past the yellow tape.

As he paced up and down the hall, a shorter man, clean shaven, was carefully cleaning children's fingerprints from the window of one of the larger fish tanks. Something seemed off about him—he had an obvious military bearing, for instance. Also, as Henry watched, it became clear that he was utterly useless at cleaning. He was simply spreading the child-marks over a larger are, not even looking at what he was doing. It went well beyond the usual apathy of a person unhappy with their career - it was as if he had never, in his lifetime, used a sponge. Why was he pretending to work as a cleaner, for the aquarium?

"Hello," said Henry. "Could I ask a question?"

"Certainly," said the man. He spoke with a London accent. "I'm Doctor John Watson," he said, extending a hand.

"Doctor Henry Morgan, Assistant Chief Medical Examiner," he replied, puzzled. "Are you a medical doctor?"

Watson dropped his gaze momentarily. "Yes, I'm an Army physician. But I'm retired now. Just... ah, just keeping busy. Wait, did you say your name was Henry Morgan? You're the very man I wanted to speak with."

Well, this was most unexpected. "Oh? What can I do for you?" 

Watson shifted his feet uncomfortably, absently polishing away a low-hanging nose print. "Well, I've been asked to introduce you to... ah, there's no good way to put this—to one of the, um, the fish. In this tank right here," he said, tapping on the tank. "I'm sorry, I know this sounds odd—but if you just bear with me, he should be coming round any minute now..."

The conversation had taken a rather abrupt left turn a few seconds back, and Henry hadn't the faintest idea what to make of it, but he thought it best to wait it out. He raised his eyebrows and walked with Watson back towards the squid tank in the hopes that the man to say something more sensible. Watson stopped at the tank opposite.

An ancient bluefin tuna swam into view, regarding them with an enormous eye. The tuna wore a flowing blue scarf which trailed majestically in the saltwater currents. Watson pressed his hand to the aquarium glass, his expression unreadable, and then turned to Henry. 

“Doctor Morgan, I would like to introduce you to Sherlock Holmes, consulting tuna.”

He stopped, puzzled at Henry’s reaction, which was to ignore John completely and gaze into the tank in slack-jawed amazement.

“I… I _know_ this tuna.”

"Hey, Henry!" Detective Martinez' voice came echoing down the hall as she burst in at top speed. "I'm sorry I'm late, there was an accident on the bridge. Come on, let's go."

Henry, shaken, looked at Watson furtively and cobbled together some string of perfunctory words as he rushed off to follow his one chance to look at the crime scene. Perhaps it was "Pleasure to make your acquaintance, sir," or something along those lines. He honestly wasn't paying attention. His thoughts were in a turmoil. That fish...

No, it couldn't be.

***

Henry's investigation of the crime scene had been well and truly scuttled by the police technicians crawling all over it. It had become abundantly clear that foul play had occurred, but beyond that he simply couldn't have the access he needed with all these... well, these _kids_ scampering all over the place. There wasn't enough room to move amongst the gangways above all of the tanks at the best of times. Typical occupancy of the gangways (not a public access area) was at most two: a marine biologist, and a person with a bucket of herring.

Henry had learned over his two hundred-and-change years that some tasks were best accomplished through subterfuge. He had waited until the dead of night, when the investigation was complete, to sneak back into the aquarium and have a second look at the crime scene on his own.

The victim had been wearing a rather nice Eton shirt, which had been missing a button. Given that one didn’t typically lose buttons whilst drowning (and Henry would know), locating the item might provide a clue as to what took place before the man ended up in the tank. Or, that was what he'd told Abe before he’d left home.

Really he wanted a second look at that tuna.

Henry followed the overhead signs back to the Squid Tank, where several large cephalopods squirted about with contented tranquility. There was no corpse floating in the tank any more, and aside from the yellow police ribbon marking out the tank as a crime scene, there was no indication of the murder that had taken place there. Henry tightened his scarf against the chill air wafting from the temperature-controlled tank and moved onward.

Henry flicked on the flashlight he had borrowed from Abe, stepped through the "staff only" door, and walked up a set of steel steps onto an overhead gangway. He was above both tanks, on the platform where the animals were fed. He swept the flashlight across the surface of the dark water, peering down.

Finally the tuna swam into view, regarding Henry balefully, its scarf tracing a graceful parabola. It made a "glub" sound, and its eye glittered wetly in the flashlight’s yellow beam.

Henry gave it a long, long look. It was so familiar... it really was hauntingly similar to another fish he had seen, or _thought_ he had seen, shortly after his first death. He shuddered at the memory, well aware that he would have to suppress it if he wanted to get anything done.

No, he was being ridiculous. He had to put this foolishness behind him. He resolutely turned his back to the tuna and began to inspect the ground carefully, getting down on his hands and knees. 

Suddenly there was a squirting, splooshing sound, and Henry found himself completely soaked from breast pocket to the ankles of his tailored slacks. Startled, Henry turned to find the tuna with its mouth poking out of the water. 

It had _spat_ at him, the rotten thing! 

Irritated, Henry said, “What did you do that for? I’m going to have to go home and change, now.”

He could have sworn, if it were at all possible, that the tuna smiled as it sank back down into the tank.

Suddenly, Henry heard footsteps and muffled voices from down below. He looked around to try and find a place to hide, but found none; the gangway was a stark strip of diamond-plate, with no door at the opposite end. 

The voices got closer. Henry looked from the squid tank to the tuna tank, uncertain. He was cut off from his one escape route! He needed to hide, and there was literally nowhere, except the tuna tank. 

Henry slipped into the water quietly so as not to make any splashing noises. He sidled up to a decorative rock wall covered in sea anemones and tried to look sessile.

Two black-clad masked figures came not a moment later up the stairs. One carried an automatic weapon, and the other had a large net and a hand cart bumping up the stairs behind him with a small barrel on it.

The men were involved in some kind of argument, though he couldn’t yet make out their words. 

The large tuna swam near Henry. It looked for all the world as though the tuna was trying to conceal Henry further from the two men—but could the tuna have been trying to attack? Henry shied back from the tuna instinctively into a more defensive position.

This move made a regrettably loud splash.

The two men turned sharply. One man, now, had a squid in a net. The other was brandishing the automatic rifle and pointing it straight at Henry.

“What are you waiting for?” said the one with the net. “Shoot him!”

That was all the warning Henry had before he was shot through the chest.

The last thing he remembered seeing as death came for him was the graceful arc of a giant tuna leaping from the tank and smacking the man with the gun over with its giant tail, and landing on the gangway with a meaty thwack.

Henry died.

***

Henry burst up from the salty waters of the East River.

There was a man on his beach. He was small and slight, with sandy hair, and impeccable posture. Unfortunately, he had clearly seen Henry surfacing.

“Doctor Morgan? What are you doing here?” said the man. He appeared flustered. "You can't be here!" It was Watson, the ex-military aquarium cleaner!

Hopefully, Henry said, “Oh, just out for a little swim,” half-expecting the man to call the police.

Watson frowned. 

“This really isn’t a good place for you to be swimming right now,” he said. “Could I ask you to move on?”

“I would love to,” Henry said. “But the water is a little cold, and I will have to get by you there. So, I’ll just—“

“No. Keep swimming,” the man said. “Just… that way. Go on.” He pointed up the river.

Henry swam closer to shore. 

“Look, I hate to be a bother, but I’d really like to get out of the water directly.”

The man was looking more and more nervous.

"You... you have to go. You have to go right now..."

With a faint, existential popping noise, an enormous tuna burst into existence on the beach. It fell to the sand with a thwack, and began to flop majestically.

The man on the beach was as white as a sheet as he ran over to the flailing fish. "Sherlock," he breathed. "Oh, no..." Reluctantly, he turned to Henry. "Well, there's no helping it now, you've seen. Could you please help me get him into the water? I can probably roll him in, but it scratches him up."

Henry closed his mouth, which was hanging agape. His mind was racing. "All right," he said, clambering onto the shore, dripping wet. "I can take its—ah, his—tail, you get the front end."

The tuna must have weighed hundreds of pounds, and it was all the two men could do to lug it into the river. Henry's hands kept slipping on the cold scales. His body was already chilled from the river, but he still gasped and shuddered as they slogged back into the water. They continued on until the fat body of the fish was deep enough to be covered, belly resting on the river’s rocky bed.

As Henry regained his breath he inspected the fish, which was calmly sweeping its tail to maintain its position in the water. The tuna had a curious, round scar behind its gill, and Henry reached out to touch it, mesmerized, fingers grazing over the small knot of tissue.

Surely not... could it be? _Was_ this the fish from his memory?

"Thanks," said Watson breathlessly. He was waist-deep in the river as well, and smiled at Henry. Then, he frowned, his eyes travelling downward. His eyes widened, a hurt and jealous expression coming across his face and Henry pulled his hand back, uncertain. John turned to the tuna.

“Sherlock, what do we—”

"Relax, John," said the tuna. "He is no longer a threat, now that he has interrupted my stakeout and gotten us both killed." 

Watson withdrew a blue scarf from his pocket, tying it lovingly around the tuna's neck and caressing its long dorsal fin. He then turned to Henry, his expression unreadable. 

"Could I _please_ ask you to dress yourself? I.. oh, you have no clothes, of course... well, could you give us a moment, alone?"

Henry, once again, was ignoring John Watson completely.

***

_APRIL 7, 1814_

_Two men faced each other on the deck of the Empress of Africa. One held a flintlock pistol. The second was frozen at the ship's starboard gunwale, hands raised._

_A storm roiled overhead. The boat rolled, battered by fifteen-foot waves._

_Then, three things happened._

_The first man fired, and the second man fell backwards into the angry sea with an expression of, more than anything else, utter surprise at the occurrence of his death. Finally, a violent flash of lightning cracked to the ocean, tearing the sky in two._

_And then, suddenly, he was alive—alive, naked, and swimming for his life in the stormy sea. He was a strong swimmer, but the sea was stronger. He lasted for perhaps five minutes before the icy, stormy water overcame him. The next wave took him below._

_And then, just as suddenly, he was alive again, bursting up from the depths..._

_and then again…_

_and again…_

_An eternity passed in this way. Henry Morgan lost count of the drownings._

_The storm passed, eventually, and the sea calmed. Henry began to be able to last for perhaps a couple of hours—but only if he didn't try to swim, and then the cold settled in. It was torture, there was no other word for it. The days and nights blurred together, death after death._

_After a while he began to hallucinate, for there was no other answer to explain events. A large fish would come to watch him as he lived, died, and lived again. Sometimes he would swim towards the fish for a while, before he succumbed to the waves. Once he reached the fish and touched it. It was a massive thing, smooth-scaled, longer than him and surely many times his own weight, with a scar behind his gills to match the scar in his own chest. It was that, more than anything else, which convinced Henry that he must surely be mad—that the fish was a manifestation of his own mind, hammering at the walls reality had wrought for him._

_In some of his lives, the fish did not come, and the solitude was worse than it had been before._

_In other lives, other hallucinations, he would hold the large dorsal fin of the fish and it would skim along the surface of the smooth sea, towing him along. Those were the good days, when he felt something akin to joy for a time._

_One day he saw land in the distance. He knew it to be a deepening of his madness, a further indignity. He swam toward it anyway, and in seemingly no time at all he was ashore. His ordeal was over. He lay on the shallow beach as the waves battered him, and turned back to the ocean._

_The fish was gone. He would never see the fish again._

_Until now._

***

"You were in a dream I had once..."

Henry, Watson and Sherlock Holmes (consulting tuna) had retired to Watson's apartment. They were in the bathroom, with Sherlock Holmes lounging in the bathtub, which was full of tea. "It's good for his scales," John had said, placing an enormous tea strainer into the tub with one hand and emptying a carton of milk into it with the other. Henry found this no harder to believe than anything else that had happened so far.

John left to boil another stock pot full of water to warm the tub while Henry sat on the toilet next to the bathtub, a task somewhat hampered by the too-small jeans and shirt the slight John Watson had leant him. The enormous tuna fixed Henry with what could only have been called a dismissive gaze. 

"Come now, Dr. Morgan, reality does not change to accommodate what you want to hide. That was no dream! You see, but you do not understand—you shy away from the truth. Stop merely looking and _observe_!" The tuna flopped emphatically with a muscular flick of its tail. "You know very well what remains once the impossible explanations have been eliminated is the truth!"

Henry closed his eyes, face white as a sheet, struggling to come to terms with the fact that he was about to reveal himself to a fish.

After a time, Henry opened his eyes. "You were there. In the ocean, you carried me. You, or a fish just like you, with the same marking, there, above your heart.”

The scar was so much like his own. He reached out again, drawn by the hypnotic familiarity of it. Sherlock’s large eye rolled to follow Henry’s hand, and he lay still to allow Henry to touch the scar. It was lumpy, the scales gnarled and twisted over the distorted flesh beneath. He pulled his hand back and pressed it to his own chest. The eye rolled again, back to Henry, who swallowed heavily.

“You... you saved my life." 

Sherlock Holmes fluttered his pectoral fins dismissively.

"That is hardly accurate, as you couldn’t seem to stop dying. It was dreadfully boring.. But yes, technically correct. Since you are on somewhat of a roll, carry on, Morgan." There was a hint of indulgence in his tone.

Henry stared at the fish in consternation. "But how is that possible? It was so long ago... I'm... I'm talking to a _fish!_ This doesn't make any sense!"

Sherlock opened his gills widely and sucked a rush of tea through them, surely the bluefin tuna equivalent of an exasperated sigh.

“Henry, the facts. Look at the _facts_.”

"You... you too are immortal, then," stated Henry.

"Good deduction," he said dryly, a fine task for a giant fish in a tub full of tea.

Henry took a shaking breath. He slid from the seat of the toilet to his knees, the better to look Sherlock in the shimmering, glassy eye.

"And in light of that fact, and if my memories of you are real, then your immortality is perhaps linked to mine..."

"Very good. But inexact. Think about the bullet wound..."

Henry frowned. "I don't understand that part. Your first death was by gunshot?"

Henry inspected the big fish's scar, leaning close over the edge of the tub until his face was a few inches from Sherlock’s slippery body. He was no expert in forensic marine ballistics—was anybody?—but now his conscious mind recognized what his instincts had already told him. The scar, so much like his own. No, not _like_ , it was the _same_!

"It was a flintlock!"

There was a sense of approval in the bubbles Sherlock blew in the tea.

"But they cannot fire underwater,” Henry continued. “You would need to have been right on the surface. Who would try to shoot a tuna? Was it some sort of a freak accident?" 

"Indeed it was. The very same bullet which ended your life, Morgan, passed through your body and buried itself in mine. I was cresting a wave at that moment. I had the extreme misfortune of chasing the wrong herring at the wrong time." 

"Then… we are alike, you and I," Henry whispered.

“Aren’t we just,” Sherlock said.

Henry’s eyes locked with Sherlock’s fishy one, and they fell into a contemplative silence.

That was when John Watson walked into the room, holding a steaming stock pot full of hot water. He stopped and looked between Sherlock, one pectoral fin draped over the side of the tub just brushing Henry’s arm, and Henry knelt by the side of the tub with his hand on Sherlock’s scar. His stiff, drawn expression spoke of deep betrayal.

"Perhaps I should go; I am evidently not required here."

The tuna rolled his eyes further. "John, come here."

John knelt beside the tub. The tuna kissed him tenderly on the forehead and took his hand in his pectoral fin.

Henry cleared his throat. "Do you two... need a moment?"

"Yes", said John, as Sherlock said, "No, not at all.”

Henry had been married twice before, with a number of dalliances of varying levels of commitment, and in his opinion Sherlock had made a rather large error with John. However, he did not feel well equipped to comment, given that human-tuna relations were somewhat outside his realm of experience.

“On the contrary, we must discuss the events at the aquarium. The two men are in the employ of an extremely dangerous criminal. John, the telephone, please?" 

With a resigned expression on his face, John withdrew his cellphone from his pocket, placed it into a ziploc bag, and dropped it into the tub. Sherlock took it with one fin, flipping through its the photos, as John left the room. Henry noted the crumpled expression on his face, but Sherlock was too deep into his line of thought to notice.

"Doctor Morgan, I must now ask you an extremely important question. What do you know about the man who died?"

Henry drew a deep sigh. "Relatively little," he said, pulling his attention back to the matter at hand. "Evidently it was foul play, as he had blunt force trauma to the head, though the official cause of death was asphyxiation through drowning. The police did find his cell phone on the bottom of the tank. Forensics is drying it out."

"No, no, _no_!" Sherlock Holmes said. "Your police are every bit as incompetent as the ones in London, I see. That phone is dead; it will have been equipped with a self-destruct device. Indeed, I know all of this, and to some degree expected it. That is why I was staking out the squid tank, undercover."

Henry snorted. "You were in _disguise_?"

"Evidently," sniffed Sherlock. "why else would there be a bluefin tuna in the albacore tuna tank? But you are not to blame. I have taken a study of several of the lesser species of fish, so that I may pass unnoticed amongst them."

Watson was stomping about in the kitchen, banging pots and pans. Henry stood and poked his head out the door to see if there was a problem, and John shot him such a poisonous look that Henry said nothing, merely retreated back to the bathroom. He sat on the toilet once again as Sherlock continued to swipe through the photos on the device.

"Do you know why the men were trying to catch squid?" Henry asked.

"Organized crime, Doctor Morgan. That was a crack team of squidnappers. Their goal was to capture the beasts and sell them to wealthy bidders, on the black-ink market. Greed got the better of them, however, and they had a critical falling out, leading to their team member's untimely demise.”

“The dead man was in on the, er, squidnapping?” Henry asked.

“Yes. I would have learned more, but you chose to blow my cover."

“As I died, I saw you attack one of them."

Sherlock looked, if it was possible, even more smug.

"Yes, I knocked both of them unconscious, one on the way down, and the second as he foolishly underestimated the reach of an unsubmerged tuna dorsal fin. Precise blows, carefully calculated to disable without knocking them into the tank. Unfortunately I was shot shortly afterwards, but my ever-faithful John phoned in an anonymous tip to your Detective Martinez. By now the squidnappers will have been arrested. Their master will be most unhappy." He gurgled, which Henry took to be a fishy chortle.

Henry raised an eyebrow. "You know their master?"

"Of course I know! I am Sherlock Holmes!” Sherlock flopped resoundingly, splashing tea everywhere, shuffling so he was propped on the side of the tub, near to tumbling over the edge onto the bathroom floor in his eagerness to give Henry the waterproof-bagged cell phone. “But what I need to know is what _you_ know, Henry Morgan. Do you recognize the man in this photograph?"

Henry took the phone and slipped it out of the bag. The photograph was of a slender, unsmiling man in a leather jacket and cap caught in the act of walking into a pier-side seafood wholesale warehouse. A chill ran down Henry's spine as he recognized those thin, cold features.

"I also know this man, and I can attest to his dangerousness. He has taken many names in the past. I know him as Adam. He is also immortal, and is _not_ to be trusted."

"That explains much. I know him by a different name—Moriarty." Sherlock twisted on the edge of the tub towards the bathroom door, bellowing. “John? _John_!"

John appeared in the doorway, face a stony mask. He looked carefully between Henry and Sherlock, as though precisely measuring the distance between them and trying to confer meaning upon each inch. Sherlock flapped a pectoral fin and draped it over Henry’s shoulder, and John’s mouth twitched at the corner. If looks could have killed, Henry would be breaching the surface of the river right now.

“John, Doctor Morgan has given us what we need to pursue Moriarty—a local alias. Go fetch my yellowfin disguise, we commence Stage Two at dawn!”

John disappeared without a word, and Henry gently shrugged the fin from his shoulder. Sherlock was nearly quivering with excitement, and the subtext of John’s silence had gone unnoticed.

“Mr. Holmes, I think perhaps you might need to speak with your, ah, _partner_ , before we move forward.”

“What? John? No, he’s fine. Temperamental, emotional creatures, you humans.”

“Sherlock,” Henry said, crouching to peer into the tuna’s large eye. “I have learned many things in the past two hundred years, and perhaps the most important of these is to respect the fragility of even the strongest love. Loyalty and devotion are empty rewards without the deeper bond of mutual respect.”

The bathroom was silent but for the gentle, subsiding ripples of tea lapping at the sides of the tub and Sherlock’s scales.

John appeared again in the doorway, this time with a large prosthetic dorsal fin in hand, and Henry stood with a warm smile.

“I’ll leave you two to your planning. Let me know when you’re ready.”

Henry pushed past John before either of them had a chance to protest, and went to the small kitchen to fix himself a tea—the entire bathtub full of the stuff had given him a fierce craving.

In the distance, he heard the murmuring of voices. Then, a splash. More splashing—quite a lot of splashing, really. Henry frowned and glanced back at the bathroom down the hall to see a trickle of thin tea run into the hall. At a warbling, guttural _glub_ he paled and retreated again to the kitchen, setting about fixing himself tea as loudly as possible, focusing on the task at hand, and the task ahead.

At dawn, they faced Adam. Adam _Moriarty_.

 

**Author's Note:**

> Let's be real - idelthoughts basically saved my ass and angsted up the ending for me. Tunalock is, at its core, a story about true love, but i couldn't see a way to make it shippy enough... thank you so much, idelthoughts!


End file.
